What the heck does UTM tag stand for?
First, let's answer the burning question everybody asks: what does UTM stand for?
UTM = Urchin Tracking Module
Boring, right? Urchin was a precursor to Google Analytics and they developed a set of five standard URL link tracking tags. Sorry, it's not more interesting than that.
What is a UTM parameter?
As noted above, UTM parameters are variables added to a URL for the purpose of tracking clicks on it.
I frequently send people links to our 'about us' page: https://www.modernops.io/about-us
Let's say I posted that link in an article, such as this one right here! It would be great to understand how much traffic that article is driving to the about-us page. All I need to do is add a '?' to the end of the url, followed by one or more of the UTM parameters below: https://www.modernops.io/about-us?utm_source=modern-ops&utm_campaign=utm-knowledge-sharing.
The five UTM parameters are:
- UTM Source (utm_source) - The referring site or system. Ex: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc
- UTM Medium (utm_medium) - The delivery method of the tracked link. Ex: email, cpc (cost per click)
- UTM Campaign (utm_campaign) - The name of the sales or marketing campaign that contained the link. Ex: 'efficient-crm-management'
- UTM Content (utm_content) - Used as something of a catch-all for any categorization not tracked with the other parameters. Officially, it's meant to record the type of link that was clicked. Ex: banner-ad, text-link.
- UTM Term (utm_term) - The search term results that the link appears in.
It's really that simple! You can pick and choose which parameters to include with each link, but best practice is to include at least the source, and ideally you'll use all five.
Viewing Results in Google Analytics
If you don't already have Google Analytics tracking set up on your website, do that immediately! You're losing valuable information about your visitors. 😜
Once your account is set up, log in to Google Analytics and click 'Reports' in the left hand navigation pane.
Then click 'Acqusition' and 'User acquisition'.
Navigate to the table at the bottom, and click the plus sign.
Next click 'Traffic source', and select any combination of UTM parameters you'd like to chop the table up by.
And that's it! Your chart will now have a new column that shows the UTM parameters of any link clicks (assuming somebody has clicked on them).
From here, you can dig into which link placements are driving the most traffic, and double down on the campaigns that are working. It's possible to go very deep with UTM and visitor analytics, but the steps above are unquestionably the starting point of the journey.
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